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Undercover Brother isn't tough enough to sting its satirical targets, so viewers just get the shaft.
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 30, 2002
One detail of the blaxploitation genre spoof Undercover Brother still nags me, hours after a preview screening. It's a small point, but a good example of what's wrong with the movie.
Eddie Griffin plays the title character (no other name is given), a throwback to the Superfly era with his voluminous Afro, black-power attitude and costumes apparently lifted from Bootsy Collins' closet. Undercover Brother gets recruited by an organization known as the B.R.O.T.H.E.R.H.O.O.D. to stand up to The Man, a shadowy Caucasian authority figure plotting to whitewash the world.
Sounds like a good start for a comedy, but what exactly do the initials B.R.O.T.H.E.R.H.O.O.D. stand for? Nobody on screen offers an answer because nobody behind the camera cared enough to carry this or many another jokes to their logical conclusions. Eleven letters means eleven words that could have been a nice punchline (the R and O beg to be "right on," for example). But like most of the material in Malcolm D. Lee's movie, his first idea is the only one.
There are some hearty laughs in Undercover Brother, the majority crammed into its opening credits, a split-screen, freeze-frame goof on the intros to films and TV shows like Dolemite and Get Christie Love. One sight gag involving an X-ray and a common threat to place a foot somewhere it isn't intended is a showstopper, and tracing the decline of black culture to Steve Urkel is sharp satire. Almost anything Dave Chappelle says as Conspiracy Brother is funny; anything Chris Kattan does as The Man's henchman isn't.
Lee (cousin of Spike Lee) is mostly content to imitate the blaxploitation genre, pointing at its dated racism without pouncing on it. Unlike Austin Powers or even the Ladies Man, Undercover Brother never sees himself as out of place and therefore can't develop sympathy. Viewers could have just as much fun renting The Mack or Foxy Brown and talking back to the screen.
Screenwriters John Ridley and Michael McCullers mean to reverse the racial dynamics of action movies, but swapping whites-eat-mayonnaise gags for watermelon insults won't do it. Neither does Denise Richards' role as White She-Devil, whose sole purpose is driving black men wild with passion and pushing Sistah Girl (Aunjanue Ellis) into a cat fight. Genre icon Billy Dee Williams plays a potential presidential candidate a la Colin Powell, then gets one running joke hawking fried chicken with minstrel-show vitality. Who's spoofing whom here?
Griffin has the appropriate swagger for playing an Afro-stud, and his undercover work as an African-American businessman seduced by the light side has potential. Yet all we get are rhythmless karaoke singing and more mayonnaise. Nearly every scene takes too long to set up a joke, then either ends too soon for its fruition or resorts to cliche, like a little old lady giving the finger. You laugh a little and squirm a lot. Undercover Brother isn't "solid," in 1970s parlance; it's shaky.
Grade: C
Director: Malcolm D. Lee
Cast: Eddie Griffin, Aunjanue Ellis, Dave Chappelle, Denise Richards, Chris Kattan, Chi McBride, Billy Dee Williams, Neil Patrick Harris
Screenplay: John Ridley, Michael McCullers
Rating: PG-13; sexual situations, crude humor, profanity, drug references